The economic arguments are rarely taken into account by those who support the ‘Swedish model’ (or End Demand). By mistaking services for products, they imagine fewer customers would result in fewer sex workers. But this is unrealistic – the assumption that the number of clients and the number of prostitutes is necessarily linked is in itself faulty. If fewer people ate at fast food outlets, would the minimum wage workers there be better off without having to do anything else? Exactly.

Arrests are on the rise in Northern Virginia; police are claiming it’s the influx of West Coast workers, but it might just be that they’ve amped up the stings in collaboration with hotels. The interesting part is that, despite the Alexandria Attorney’s statements about trafficking, local police disagree:

But police in both jurisdictions say they aren’t seeing many similar trafficking cases. Instead, many cases are “women that are working for themselves,” said Crystal Nosal, an Alexandria police spokeswoman.

“The ease of the Internet . . . kind of eliminates the need for the old-fashioned pimp,” Malcolm said.

Runaways in the Midlands, like runaways in many other places, turn to sex work to pad the scanty incomes of panhandling. Though mostly sensationalist (the girls date “notorious robbers”!) it hits on some true and painful facts, like the stigma of sex work making it hard to return to homes and communities of origin.

Sex worker advocates argue sex workers must be included in developing anti-trafficking initiatives. In a promising move, restrictions on funding for those organizations that work with active sex workers were lifted by the Obama administration in 2010. Organizations like the Sex Workers Project believe the move away from criminalization of sex work and instead towards harm reduction is paramount to more successfully addressing sex trafficking. This group is one of the first in the nation to assist survivors of human trafficking. The organization “provides client-centered legal and social services to individuals who engage in sex work, regardless of whether they do so by choice, circumstance or coercion,” and is the only U.S. organization working with both active sex workers and trafficking victims.